Tracking through Mziwandile Yawa's mining career

 
Mziwandile Yawa

      Mziwandile Yawa, a veteran of a long and arduous mining career, was born in Newlands, in 1940. He started his regular stints on the gold mines when he was 18 years old. The first mine he worked on was at Stilfontein Gold Mine. He had numerous stints during his migrant career on different mines. These included East Daggafontein Gold Mining and ending his career as Team Leader at Elsburg Gold Mines, on the Far West Rand

     Working on these specific mines had nothing to do with personal preferences. Nor did reputations of the mines, concerning cruel or patronizing or otherwise mine managers, good or bad mine conditions on different have anything to do with the choices of where he would work. He was simply instructed by the recruiting agency of the Chamber of Mines, TEBA, and told where he would work. So the levels of danger associated with individual gold mines so often spoken about by people coming and going to the mines made a very mixed bag of emotions for young men intending to follow in the footsteps of their peers. Sometimes you had heaven in one mine, where ground conditions were safe, where ventilation was good and working places cool or distances to be travelled from the shaft station to working station short and easy; but more often with most mines, and especially the newer one's, the migrant workers would unwittingly end up in hell, in the belly of the earth, hot as hades and rockfall occurrences killing workers in the order of the day. This was especially so at Stilfontein Gold Mine where a single siesmic event saw the mine closed down for good. But this happened long after Mziwandile was through with his career, back at home with his people in Newlands, muttering . . . "thank God, I was not killed or had any of my workers under my supervision killed"

Choice of what mine migrants would work was predetermined by the profit motif of the mining bosses. Pay was determined by the monopolistic mine bosses and made no provision for compensatory arrangements for working in safer or more dangerous mines.   The Chamber of Mines acted as the voice of all mine owners setting stringent labour regulations that were implemented by all the mines, as well as by its employment arm, TEBA. If any mine had a labour shortage then the new recruit was sent there.

     TEBA played a central role in the lives of migrant miners. All records from the respective mines were centralized in TEBA offices. These records included job records of migrants, performance records and medical records. Besides social networks among the miners themselves, TEBA was the official means of communication between migrants and their families at home in the rural areas. In his old day Mziwandile laments this: “I have no records to show, nothing to go by to validate my long career on the mines. I have no history. I do not even have pay slips because everything was paid to TEBA who then made the money available to me via their East London office”. Indeed, this is a very sore point for many mine migrants. Many feel that they are owed money, especially compensation for injuries or occupational disease related to working in dangerous rockfall situations and dusty working places. But TEBA, and even the Chamber of Mines itself, seem to have migrated all these records and promises to another planet. Black miners feel robbed of their life’s work, cast aside, forgotten and ignored with hardly even a mention of the iniquities of their labour conditions in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Mine owners never made a proper confession for these evils before the TRC.       

     It was not for nothing that among the black migrant workers there were, and still are powerful personalities and legends. Mziwandile Yawa certainly is a legend carrying under his skin a history of wage slavery that shocked the civilized world. Like in his own youth, Mziwandile was enthralled and eager to “join the mines”. While gruesome, it was an adventure into the unknown. But some young men, after doing only one contract of work on the mines, returned home never to return to that hell again. They came back disenchanted, and often felt disgraced in their communities and by their peers for "giving up". Suicide of young recruits on the mines was common. For many, going to the mines established manhood. While financial considerations to work on the mines certainly was an issue, it actual fact it was more moral persuasion in what Dunbar Moodie classified as a "moral economy" providing a spacial tpe of working environment involving, communal agriculture and the mine owners. Outside of the mines the barest of a rural occupation was possible such as herding cattle, best left to younger boys. Outside of mining or remaining in the rural areas, the only employment around the towns of the Border Region was either on the Railways or in the Harbour. These employment opportunities were scarce.
besides, in such employment there was no adventure, no social status to be achieved. These moral persuasions made migrant labour extremely profitable for the mine owners. As mine exploiters explained, the low wages paid were not wages as such, but doing the migrants a favour by supplementing their earnings from agriculture in the rural areas.          

     It is well known that enormous amounts of rock was broken a kilometer or more underground. This broken rock would have to be hauled to surface from thousands of feet underground, merely to produce minute fractions of an ounce in gold per skip load of ore. Mziwandile often marveled with his comrades about the rationality of this. Where does the money come from? Looking at the huge rock and slimes dumps, figuring that huge heaps of gold was somehow hidden from sight. The labour was painfully real, but where was its product? Today Mziwandile has this to say: “all this work merely to rebury our gold in Fort Knox in America!”. This anomaly was only possible because of the cheap labour which black, migrant workers provided. “Just think”, he suggests, “if this huge labour effort was expended in development of our own areas in the rural areas? What a difference it would have made!”  Given these observations it is clear that the alienation of labour from its product was alienation of the first order. Yawa could not see how  the mines led to the growth of Africa's greatest metropolitan complex, the fruits of migrant worker labour, but were left bereft of any idea to what extent the migrants were being exploited to the benefit of many thousands of mine owners, officials and owners of shares in the mines

     Indeed what was stolen from black workers in monthly wages equal to white white people paid to their children to go buy an ice cream, ended up building the wealth of South Africa in general, and white people in particular. Mziwandile comments: “there is no rational reason for this. The level of skill for doing many general mining jobs reserved for whites, could be done as well, if not better, by black workers. So why were we robbed of the fruits of our own labour!?”

     As a Team Leader working on Elsburg Gold Mine, as late as 1975, Mziwandile was earning 60c per shift! His white peers were earning twenty times that amount!

     There are two explanations for this wide wage discrepancy. The first is that black migrant workers generally were peasants and, who like Mziwandile, and in the view of mine owners had access to land, even though limited through colonial expropriation, they could plough, had livestock and could subsist as agriculturists. The mine bosses, working hand-in-glove with the previous colonial government of the British, calculated that black migrants could be “smoked out” of the rural areas for short stints of employment by forcing them to pay “hut taxes” on each ubuhlanti (clan homestead). The additional income that came in from the mines was a mere top up, it enabled young peasants to get started by accessing cattle and starting their own ubuhlanti. Men like Mziwandile became role models and pillars in the community, heading a ubuhlanti and living ubuntu, and supposedly a lifestyle of equality. He managed as a peasant subsisting on agriculture, but barely so. The rural areas where over populated, soil erosion pervasive and often there were droughts when nothing grew and cattle died. But the best part of his life, when he meant so much to his community, was robbed by this evil migrant labour system that only profited the rich. His life was his people and his people’s welfare were his well being. With seven children, his first son was born in 1970, for most of his life he was absent, away from home where he was needed most and meant to be - in Newlands, where crops could be grown, and cattle and sheep kept on pastures, and children parented.

     And yet, with little education and training the Mining Corporations could extract the same level of general skills from the migrant workers as they previously did with white workers. During his life on the mines Mziwandile did jobs like Winch Driver and Team Leader on successive mines. He and other black workers were as, if not better skilled at doing these highly productive jobs than the best of white miners. 

     And it was not asif the mine bosses had any illusions that they were not dealing with talented people rather than “savages” spoken of by Smuts and Churchill.  When black migrant workers enlisted and went through induction training, there was an elaborate system of skills selection. Selecting those with leadership skills was done in the same way as the British Army used for selection of men for Officer training. Mziwandile made the grade and initially was trained as a Winch Driver. This demanded a sober mind, great physical endurance, and technical skill. Given the earnings discrepancy between white miners and local migrants one is immediately aware that as mining was the basis of South African economic development, so too it was built by black wage slavery and responsible for the enormous inequality in South African society which became embedded in its economy to this day! And mining was never like picking of cotton, but required high degrees of skills and a great sense of responsibility. Team Leaders, had to be men of stature who could be entrusted with the responsible for other peoples’ lives. .            

Stilfontein

     Many people are under the impression that gold was discovered in the Johannesburg area in 1886. While true in that these were the richest and most viable finds until then, the fact is that gold was already being mined on small scale in the places like Barberton, Dominion Reefs, and other mines in the Klerksdorp area.

     So long before gold was discovered in Johannesburg in 1886, another find was made decades earlier was just outside Klerksdorp, on a property adjoining that of Stilfontein today. An old picture of this discovery shows a wooden makeshift shaft with white miners celebrating because gold was found. However, in the long run there was a snag. At that time there were no migrant workers willing to sell themselves into wage slavery. The white workers you see in the picture clamouring up the mineshaft were mostly imported from the Corniosh tin mines, in England. They were proletarians who knew the value of industrial organization and they were certainly not prepared to work for a few sixpences and a ticky per day. And especially not in skilled jobs later done by black workers, but because of Apartheid laws, which outlawed any form of labour organization, veteran miners like Mziwandile were later forced to work basically for nothing.

  Daggafontein

     The difference between the early gold mine close to the Klerksdorp discovery decades earlier but abandoned not many years later, and Daggafontein Gold Mine discovered is instructive. The migrant labour system made the difference between viability and non-viability of mines. Employing white workers for general mining skills, such as Machine Drillers, Winch Drivers and Team Leaders were certainly no jobs for sissies. It took much experience on the job before workers could become proficient at what they were doing. Reason? White miners made themselves indispensable, as they were able to organize in Trade Unions to dictate wages to the mine bosses. As the white miners "graduated" into supervisory jobs over these high skill jobs, so the black migrant workers were reduced to slave labours working for no more than one twentieth part of wages than these whites.

     The Mine bosses therefore did everything possible to prevent any opportunity for migrant workers to organize Trade Unions. They were kept strictly regimented both underground and in the compounds (nowadays called “hostels”). The workers seen in the Daggafontein picture coming up from underground by multilevel “cages” (lift shafts) are tired, agitated and hungry and had only one thing in mind: get through the crush where their headlamps could be handed in, and make a rush for the mess hall where those who made it to there earlier got extra helpings of food.

Elsburg

     The mines in the area, including Westonaria, Venterspost, Libanon, Elsburg, and the newer mines like Western Deep Levels, had huge problems to cope with before they could become profitable. Western Area Gold Mine and Elsburg started working together in sinking a joint shaft and shared many facilities such as housing for its black workers in Carletonville.

     It is symptomatic when one reads the histories of these mines its almost asif black workers did not exist. And yet, the almost superhuman conditions that had to be overcome, such as extreme heat, very dangerous rock at deep levels, striking huge aquifers deep underground, were right in the face of black workers while white miners were sipping coffee in their safe dugouts and gossiping among themselves. The profit motive of the mine bosses ignored human endurance in order to get these mines up and running at very huge profits.

     Aerial photograph on the mines on the West Rand area show beautiful sunsets, "magnificent" white tailings dumps and refining plants. All shambolic! But then, the sun has set over the mining industry in South Africa leaving broken communities and environmental degradation in its wake. Such lovely pictures to entice overseas investors to draw their profits from the richest mines in the world a good indication of how mining has in fact distinguished the future of South Africa, its people and its environment!